Former President Donald Trump has shown he has great pride in plucking the next wave of his personal favorites to become Republican stars in the U.S. Midterms 2022.
When he was still in the White House, Trump wrote on Twitter: “As long as I campaign and/or support Senate and House candidates (within reason), they will win!”
In this primary season for the upcoming midterm elections, Trump played his hand again. New analysis shows that over the past several months, candidates endorsed by Trump have secured victories across the country, winning 92 percent of the time.
But experts say that while Trump may have backed winners, it does not mean that they won because of Trump. Many of these races were a sure thing from the beginning.
About a quarter of Trump’s candidates ran unopposed. And there is a large majority (74 percent) of incumbents running this year, tried and true Republican candidates who won their seats previously and were expected to cinch the nomination again.
In fact, only a single Trump-endorsed incumbent lost: the scandal-ridden Madison Cawthorne, who served two years as a House representative from North Carolina.
In his home in Palm Beach, Florida, the self-proclaimed “king” of endorsements has weighed in on almost 200 races, backing Republican candidates running for the Senate, House, or state governor in 39 out of 50 states.
Endorsing about 200 candidates is an unusually high number. During the 2018 midterms, he backed just under 90 candidates for those same positions. That same year, former President Barack Obama endorsed 94 candidates.
Experts said Trump is clearly endorsing a number of people who are going to win anyway, so he can run up the percentage of victories, calling it simply a strategy to run the numbers up.
In many ways, Trump’s endorsements seemed to be less about providing support than a personal mission to banish his critics from office. Loyalty to him was key in an endorsement. And on the other side, no candidates were more aggressively targeted by Trump and his allies than the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for his role in the 6 January Capitol riots.
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